A little while ago in the “left-wing, right-wing” discussion, I rather unkindly commented that the Irish voter doesn’t make decisions on a left/right basis, but on a “costs me/costs someone else” basis. Elsewhere, and equally cynically, I’ve said that anyone who believes the Irish “don’t do civil disobedience” is missing the fact that the characteristic of Irish civil disobedience is that it is not overt or loudly demonstrative but instead consists of passive resistance to unwelcome measures, and is normally found only when a government measure costs money.

I think this is another good example of that feature – there’s a form of Irish “social solidarity” where nobody challenges anyone else’s playing of the poor mouth card, and expects similar license themselves. Only about half the population appears to be willing to pay taxes on the basis of the sort of social solidarity found in, say, Nordic countries – the other half won’t reach for their wallets unless they’re obviously going to be forced to do so.

I’m thinking of the Household Charge, the non-means-tested Medical Card, student fees, household rates (back in the day), septic tank charges, turf cutting, and so on – the examples are pretty numerous, and all share the same feature, which is that a hit to the pocket gets you a revolt. To some extent one can even attribute some of the Greens’ electoral unpopularity to the 5c “carbon charge” on fuel. Even our attitude to Europe seems largely determined by whether it’s perceived as giving us money or costing us money.

I’d consider passive resistance characteristic because the public demonstrations, in most cases, were quite small – and often consisted of the same people – while the effect on the government usually resulted from a far wider pattern of passive non-payment or non-compliance.

I’ve discussed “salience” elsewhere specifically in respect of the household charge, and agree it’s important, but nothing I’ve said requires that it not be.

There’s an easy upcoming test, of course, which is water charges. I’d expect to see there the exact same results as the household charge – there will be a number of “public meetings” with much the same faces at each one (SF/ULA making political capital and grabbing airtime, essentially), and a wider pattern of passive non-compliance which will be decisive.

As to the “most vulnerable in society” and the Nordic model – that’s the point, really. We’re not talking about the “most vulnerable in society”, most of whom are exempt from the household charge in any case – we’re talking about people’s readiness to proclaim themselves as “most vulnerable” when by any objective measure they’re not, and what is actually objected to is that they are losing some of their discretionary spending capacity.

There is room for a lot of shading on details, some of which you’ve picked up on, but I would say that my central point here is that Irish politics is primarily about the money in one’s own pocket at all levels, from the voting public to the elected representatives (with the latter a reflection of the former), and that public debate revolves around money to the exclusion of principle. As an ancillary point, I would say the Irish public demonstrates certain forms of rather negative social solidarity about money, such as not contradicting someone else who is playing the “poor mouth” card in order not to be contradicted when playing it oneself. The “most vulnerable in society” thing I regard as merely another card in this kind of play – a form of hypocritical claim that frames one’s argument for personal benefit as a moral argument, and one’s opponent, therefore, as callous and vicious.

I don’t like that kind of argument from either side – on another thread, we had a poster framing opposition to mortgage write-downs in an equally tendentious way, with non-payers characterised as well-off D4 types while those who wouldn’t get a write-down characterised as quintessentially good Irish people. Either way round, it’s grossly dishonest, and regrettably characteristic of public discourse in Ireland. One might say that the love of money is the root of all Irish politics, but that it’s the love that dare not speak its name, and therefore hides behind a cloak of decency – which renders much Irish public discourse fabulously hypocritical.

Finally the last to admit that Ireland is deperate for financial aid do so – the Irish government. Earlier in the week they denied they had asked for help from Europe but today the IMF and co. arrived regardless.

Many awoke after 9-11, a full nine years ago, but we were and still are shunned by ignorant fools who trust authority. We have had to watch a predictable unfolding story play out in America and across Europe, our warnings sneered at. The description you so brilliantly paint of Ireland’s journey is not unique, and the UK travels the same path.

There is no left, no right, there is only the illusion of power and the illusion of weakness, and people to cowardly to do the right things. Stop allowing journalists and politicians to do your thinking for you, or you will be lead like cattle to the slaughter house. Stop cheating and lying and competing with each other, as if your enemy is your neighbour.

The greatest problem is perhaps that people can’t even see who their enemy is. They can’t see because they need to trust, for life is too complex and frightening if you can’t trust those in authority. You can’t see because your enemy is organized and lies and controls, while you are disorganized, gullible and obedient.

We who have seen this coming need you all to awake. But more important than that, you need you to awake, and your children and grand children need you to awake.

XBMC is the best HTPC software available. It’s free, highly customizable, lookgs good and supports loads of codecs and is great for navigating large collections, even using a remote control… did I mention it’s free and open-source? Awesome. XBMC is great for playing movies, TV shows, music and viewing photos. It manges libraries well and is skin-able with loads of slick eye-candy interfaces.

Setting up XBMC

You can install XBMC-live if you want to boot directly into it, but if you’ve got the Revo 3600 you’ve more than enough power to run it from within Windows 7 which is what I recommend. This way you have the benifit of running other windows software which I’ll mention later in this post.

Here’s the steps I took to set things up:

Install XBMC, well duh of course, this is straightforward right? err, no it isn’t actually. The latest stable release for windows doesn’t support hardware accelerated HD video playback. So if you plan on watching some sweet blu-ray rips you’ll need to get a nightly build from svn. It’s officially unstable and dangerous but I’ve had no major problems and need HD video playback.

When you run XBMC in the video settings set it to use DXVA so that high def movies play smoothly.

Other useful HTPC software

If you like to get your TV shows via torrents then there’s two programs that are essential.

utorrent: marked as ‘a very tiny BitTorrent client’ and indeed it is, but good things come in small packages. It’s the best torrent client. Free, light, configurable, easy to use and no bundled crapware – Azureus I’m looking at you.

Torrent Episode Downloader: TED is great idea and I’m not even talking about the awesome TED or even better Ted. You select what TV shows you like and it checks for new epiosdes and downloads them as they become available. The app is nice and user friendly. It’s light and easy to add the shows you like specifiying at what episode you want to start downloading. It still doesn’t work perfectly though, it rejected some of the proposed downloads for me, but it’s the best I’ve seen for this purpose thus far./li>

Remote Control

It’s a pain using a keyboard and mouse to control your HTPC. Even if they’re wireless they still don’t belong on the couch in my opinion. The best solution is a dedicated remote control. I found a good budget one in the Empirex 3009URF. It’s 16 quid and RF not infra-red so you don’t need to worry about line of sight to your Revo. It’s designed for controlling Windows Media Centre but using the excellent free Event Ghost application you can use it for XBMC.

IGN did countdown of the Top 25 Simpsons Guest Appearences. They only ranked it at #21 but my favourite Simpsons cameo of all time has got to be from the unkempt youngster James Taylor from the classic ‘Deep Space Homer’ episode (Season 5, Episode 515 if you really need to know). Here’s the clip:

So now that you’ve decided on an Acer Revo as a HTPC it’s time to get the software sorted. I bought the cheaper Revo with Linpus Linux on it by default. I then replaced this with Windows 7. What you’ll need are:

A Windows 7 ISO image

An SD card (at least 4gigs)

First download and install Virtual Clone Drive from here. It’s free and spyware free. Afterwards right click on your Windows 7 ISO file and mount as a drive.

Then follow the steps in the video carefully, it’s important that you copy the files exactly as instructed:

Once you’ve followed the steps to make the card bootable and have Win 7 on it, put the card into the card reader of your revo and start it up and quickly press F12 to enter the bios and set it to boot from the SD card first. Restart and proceed with the installation.

I *love* digital media. I like all my movies, music and TV shows to be available whenever I want to access them by browsing through them on a nice graphical display. I hate having to use any physical media like CDs or DVDs, I just want one magic box in the living room with everything available at the click of a button. I finally have a great solution but before I talk about that lets have a look at the what I’ve tried in the past.

Media Playing External Drives

Freecom Media Player

First I got a Freecom external hard-drive with embedded media playing software and buttons on the case for navigating it. This was the cheapest option at the time but the UI was basic, ugly and navigating a large music collection was pretty much unworkable. It also had no remote control, but the market of consumer electronics for this purpose was relatively young back then.

Archos 605 and DVR docking station

Archos 605 with docking and remote

Next I got the docking station and remote control for the Archos 605 30gig portable media player that I already had. The archos wasn’t cheap (300 euro and another 100 for the docking), but it was a brilliant portable media player for its time and it worked surprisingly well in the home with this upgrade.

The downside was limited storage and eventually lack of support for newer video codecs and containers. Recent mp4s and mkvs just weren’t working on it. It is still handy as a portable player though, especially on holidays.

Playstation 3

Playstation 3

After this I got a Playstation 3. I was already tempted to get this purely for the gaming side of things, but apparently it could play (and stream from networked PCs) music and video too. Perfect I thought! but it was another case of the hardware being capable but the software and UI being under developed and painful for large collections. Also Sony annoyed a lot of people by not improving the codec support.

It is great as a DVD and Blu-Ray player and I’ve rediscovered the joy of gaming after a 10 year hiatus. Excellent value for money, but not a full featured media player.

The Acer Revo (aka media playing heaven)

Acer Revo 3610

This brings me to the conclusion I made a month ago: PCs are now small enough and cheap enough that it’s worth buying one for the specific purpose of playing media – a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) as they are known. I had a few hard requirements:

Ability to play Hi-def video without skipping

HDMI out providing HD video and 5.1 surround sound

Small and quiet when in use

Low power usage

200-300 Euro price range

Wired and wireless networking

There were other common requirements that didn’t matter to me such as DVR functionality and an optical media drive. I don’t care about recording live TV and I already have the PS3 that covers gaming, and the rare cases that I’ll want to play a DVD/CD/Blu-ray.

There are both lower and higher spec’d Revos, but I felt 2GB of RAM was necessary but 4GB was not and I also wanted the Atom 330 over the 230. You can buy it with either Linpus Linux or windows 7 but Linux is about 50 quid cheaper. I went for this and decided to put Windows 7 on manually myself.

Follow-up posts provide guides to setting up the best software for a HTPC: